All posts tagged ‘Internet of Things’

Several years ago now, I bought a Nazbatag:tag. You know, the internet-connected rabbit? It looks all anime and flashes colors and reads you RSS feeds. It has been relaunched in a third iteration as Karotz. Ever since that rabbit has sat on my desk, announcing the time or occasionally making an appearance at a talk or presentation I give on education technology, I can’t help but think he was a little ahead of his time. People still hadn’t grasped what it meant to have computers in things that didn’t have screens. But, with the launch of Ubi on Kickstarter the other day I sense people are starting to understand the Internet of Things.

I’m addicted to the whole concept of the Internet of Things, and it is having an impact on my bank balance. From the novelty of a computerized ball that I control with my smart phone (Sphero), through to the Pebble Watch or the Makey Makey UI system, the ability to make things other than computers and phones a part of the network is increasing.

What excites me is that I don’t have to be fully immersed in the Arduino/Maker culture to be able to shape and play with devices connected to the network. I’m looking forward to playing with senors and devices like Twine and Ninja Blocks to see how I can shape and change the way my world works when heat senors and moisture and light sensors are introduced into my world and able to send me messages. Indeed, I look at the Raspberry Pi folks and the Makers with their 3D printers and Arduinos with envy and awe. My hands are best used for writing words and I shape the world in a different way, but I’m quietly wishing I could wrap my brain around logic and soldering irons the way they do.

What I find exciting is that these things, like all other technology, have potential uses that we have not yet figured out. You can’t identify them until they become a ubiquitous part of the network. A good example is how Twitter has become a tool for citizen journalism and reportage, when the initial sell was as a tool to keep family and friends updated. I’m interested in how the Internet of Things could transform classrooms and businesses and the operation of your own house. Sure, it is still a while away from Eureka’s S.A.R.A.H., but we have to begin somewhere.

I am loving the emergence and adoption of the Internet of Things as a Dad. I love introducing this technology to my children and listening to their perspectives, their acceptance that this is a real thing, and commentary on how they might use it in their lives. As a GeekDad, I believe I have a role supporting my children to explore, engage, and help shape the future through technology.

Of course, a part of this is the wide-eyed approach to anything new and “shiny-shiny”, but I’ll embrace that approach whole-heartedly. If it is the new that drives my interests and passion – so be it. And, at the moment that new is the Internet of Things; the network creeping outside the screen into fridges and drawers and watches and sensors that only need two AA batteries. I want a future where the transport network is part of the Internet, so all the self-driven vehicles tell each other where they are on the road and track and provide the most efficient routes around a city. I want my hallstand to print photos, and turn the digital back to analogue and be something tangible I can hold in my hands like the folks at Supermechanical are playing with. I want to be able to plug and play these devices, so the programmers have put in the hard yards to give me an interface that allows me to create intuitively and not spend hours with the instruction manual.

And, this may all lead to a world controlled by Cylons, possibly. But maybe it won’t; maybe we will heed the messages of our science fiction soothsayers. In the meantime, let us keep exploring and experimenting with our kids in a world of things and wires and devices that let us exploit the connections and the network even more.

While I have a great fondness for developing and prototyping my electroncis projects on the Arduino platform, and I always will love the Arduino and Atmel microcontrollers, there is new favorite in my toolkit now as well. The TinkerForge system.

The TinkerForge system is a set of pre-built electronics boards that are built in such a way that you can stack the boards (known as bricks), attach accessories (known as bricklets), and have your prototype and and running quickly. Unlike systems, such as the Arduino or Launchpad, the TinkerForge has to be attached to a computer and the computer does all of the work. With an easy set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in C/C++, C#, Java, PHP, and Ruby, the system is easy to interface and program over USB in a snap. I am usually a C/C++ programmer as a preference but I decided to take the time to learn something new with the TinkerForge so I have been working on rapid prototyping in Python. TinkerForge won the 2012 CHIP award for Product of the Year where the two years prior had been won by Panasonic and Lufthansa.

The heart of the TinkerForge system is the Master Brick. The Master Brick runs on an Atmel ATSAM3S4C microcontroller so I am sticking with my love of Atmel controllers — they’re everywhere! The Master Brick provides the USB interface and main communications portal between the computer and the stack. In addition to USB, you can also utilize Master Extensions that provide alternate communications interfaces. There is an RS485 interface available and, when I got my kit, a sub 1GHz radio interface known as a Chibi Extension. For various reasons, the TinkerForge team has informed me that they have stopped producing this extension but are working on an 802.11 interface in its place. The really neat thing about the way they have implemented the Master Extensions is that they are seamless to the user. Once they are configured it doesn’t matter if your stack is separated across the interface or all on the same physical stack, talking to all of the components on the stack works with the same code interface.

Additional bricks provide more functionality. Three of the additional bricks provide interfaces to motors and servos. One is a pure DC motor driving brick that provides up 25 V and 5 A. One provides the ability to drive a stepper motor up to 38 V and 2.5 A per stepper phase. Finally, there is a Servo Brick capable of driving up to seven servos up to a maximum of 3 A. For all of these devices, there is an independent DC power input should you need to use the power ranges above the standard USB 5V and (generally) less than an Amp power supplied over USB. There is also a debugging module that allows you to pull JTAG and serial console debugging information.

There is one more Brick that deserves a shout-out of its own. The IMU Brick. IMU stands for Intertial Measurement Unit and provides information about position and rotation of the brick. The IMU Brick features measurements via a 3-axis magnetometer, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a 3-axis gyroscope resulting in 9 degrees of freedom. For position calculations. The TinkerForge team goes out of their way to make using such a complex device simple, providing the position information as both a roll, pitch, and yaw or as a quaternion set. All of the calculations on-board are computed with quaternions, avoiding the gimbal lock that comes with Euler Angles. It is amazingly simple to use!

From the Master Brick, connections are enabled to a set of Bricklets that allow for various sensor inputs and output to and from the stack. As of this writing, there are 20 available Bricklets. The two LCD Bricklets make information output to an LCD about as easy as it gets and comes in two flavors, a 16×2 LCD and a 20×4 LCD. There is a large list of sensors available including light, humidity, temperature, voltage, and current. There are also Bricklets that allow for analog input to add your own favorite analog sensors. Potentiometers, a buzzer, digital IO expansions, relay controls, and a joystick help round out the category.

Connecting to a stack and working with the inputs and outputs is simple and only requires a few lines of code. For example, in Python, to connect to the stack, take a temperature measurement, and output it to the LCD takes only a few simple lines of code. Less than two dozen, actually, by my code.

Overall, I give the TinkerForge system very high marks. I am using it right now to start prototyping a my home automation system which I am calling the Home Administration and Laboratory system, or HAL. It was very easy to go from nothing to having a system gather information remotely via the wireless extension, report the information out to an LCD and also record the data to a Cosm feed, creating an Internet of Things system very quickly. Be mindful that they are located in Europe so taking into account the Euro conversion and shipping if you are in the US. I can’t say enough about how much fun this product has been to use!

Imagine not just reading a chemistry textbook but having the results of the experiments you are doing at that moment in time incorporated into it. It’s that sort of interactivity that is the promise of the Ninja Blocks project which is just about to launch after gaining enthusiastic backing on Kickstarter.

The idea behind Ninja Blocks is to make it possible to connect a series of sensors to the web without any serious electronic skills or programming experience. You plug in the Ninja Block, add sensors and output to the Web or to other real-world devices. Welcome to the Internet of Things.

With a built-in accelerometer and thermometer, a Ninja Block can sense its environment out of the box. With additional external sensors, Ninja Blocks can sense current, humidity, motion, distance, sound, light and even capture video. Output can be to web services such as Twitter, Facebook or Dropbox; or to lights, motors, and other actuators through expansion ports. So without being an electronics whiz you can have your house tell you how warm it is, be tweeted when the doorbell goes, receive an SMS when your child plays on the Xbox. The possibilities seem to be limited mostly by the user’s imagination. And it’s all wonderfully open-source, so it can be extended almost indefinitely.

It’s not all just fun stuff though. The developers are looking at many ideas and applications for the Blocks. In talking to developer Marcus Schappi about using the blocks in an educational environment, he mentioned that they had been working hard to get the blocks to talk to Apple’s new iBooks Author so that you could make a textbook that reacts to its environment. There are some really exciting possibilities there.

Ninja Blocks is the brainchild of a group of electronic enthusiasts from Sydney Australia. Its Kickstarter project is already over-subscribed but well worth a look as backers get some nice deals when the Blocks are released.